Joshua Sabin – Terminus Drift

Faith is important in establishing a goal. While when you have a goal minded, you get stuff achieved, sound designers like Joshua Sabin use textural polymath addition to present to the listener an exquisite drone suite. Much of this stuff is glimmery dark fare, an ideologue the polymath musician likes to take to lengths in ambient. The pieces are fairly slimmed down, though, taking a minimalist in the truest sense approach, whicn gives a necessary dynamism to everything.

Joshua Sabin may have had other releases, for me this is the first on my player. The sounds create a huge sense of pining, dialect transfusion in magenta and stag hues, shady tones coloured with clashing colours – recipe for disaster? Not so, lots of dark ambient takes this trend. The ancillary movement creates the lever, the lever is pressed, the lever is the massive shifts of almost soporific transmogrification. While reverse leitmotif theory was pioneered by Wagner – the very concept of turning an album inside out – the methodology behind the love gained for these tracks is in their lushness.

A notable theme is that glimmer of hope aesthetic, often used by Matthew Cooper of Eluvium to promote a type of natural, heavy-heart-heartening catharsis that bucks the trend of perception by questions. Questioning all the outcomes, as we do as composers. Where does enough become stale? Where does stale become enough? Can you really create a reverse leitmotif in that case? A press release recently for one of Glacial Movements Malfatti brothers noted the ‘just existing’ nature of its music. How it never goes away, how it is lost in time. In philosophy, if you want to make ‘it’ go away, you create – and so you create the paradigm – described accurately as ‘this’. But words are just words. Thankfully, Joshua Sabin has enough control of ‘this’ album to formulate a plot to be put on a pedestal as an early highlight for 2k17. Essential!